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A New Sound System for New Contemporary Church, Part 2

It’s always a luxury to get in on a brand new church with a completely fresh AV installation and when Elite Multimedia of Memphis, Tenn., was called in to set up new sound for Piperton’s Living H9/20/2012 8:17 AM Eastern

Author: With Bennett Liles

A New Sound System for New Contemporary Church, Part 2

Editor’s note: For your convenience, this transcription of the podcast includes timestamps. If you are listening to the podcast and reading its accompanying transcription, you can use the timestamps to jump to any part of the audio podcast by simply dragging the slider on the podcast to the time indicated in the transcription.

It’s always a luxury to get in on a brand new church with a completely fresh AV installation and when Elite Multimedia of Memphis, Tenn., was called in to set up new sound for Piperton’s Living Hope Church they built it all around a Midas Pro2C digital mixer. Wade Russell is back to tell us about the Shure wireless mics and the d&b Audioteknik gear they used on the job, coming up next on the SVC Podcast.

SVC: Wade, thanks for being back with us for the SVC Podcast on the new sound system installation at the Living Hope Church in Piperton, Tenn. The sound system that you installed and worked with Tim Johnson, the AV tech guy at the church. How big is the band at that church? I know it’s a contemporary worship style so they’ve got lots of live music.

Wade Russell: Yeah, their band basically is led by David Lewis. He’s the worship pastor out there. He does a great job. [It’s] basically contemporary band; they have drummer, percussion, bass player, acoustic guitar, a couple of electrics, and a couple of keyboards and then a couple of background vocals. So [it’s a] reasonably small worship band, but high quality and good sounding contemporary music. So it’s fun. [Timestamp: 1:29]

And that’s a lot to handle. That may not sound like a huge band, but that can be a handful with volunteers doing everything. The digital board helps a lot on that. So what do they do there for stage monitoring for all those live performers?

They started off as a portable church and obviously had some preexisting equipment with that. And they had the Aviom system, and the Aviom personal mixers are a good solution for a lot of the band, and so we integrated their system to work with that. So most of their band members have Aviom, but then their background vocals and their worship pastor, they’re on a Sennheiser in-ear monitor solution and basically just get their feed from that Pro2 at FOH. So there are four monitor mixes that go out from there and also all the direct outs or mix outs are controlled through the Aviom system, but they’re all on in ears and there’s no wedges on stage; [that] helps control the volume on stage, which is always a good thing. [Timestamp: 2:26]

Yeah, in-ear monitors are great for avoiding stage clutter and everything, but there also may be a little getting used to it on the part of the performers not having all that ambient atmosphere in their ears all the time. But as far as the pictures, what did they want to do with video upgrades?

They actually were trying to save some money and so they kind of asked us some questions with video stuff and we consulted with them a little bit but they actually decided to do their video stuff on their own. They installed a Christie projector and a screen, and it works great for what they needed. They’re not doing any type of camera set up right now. It’s pretty straight forward, just ProPresenter and lyrics on the screen. [Timestamp: 3:05]

OK so where’s the control point for the video and lighting? Is that all in the same place?

Yeah, everything’s centrally located in a FOH booth, which is just off center of the room before the seats go into a stadium kind of configuration, and the lighting and video and audio is all in that one booth. [Timestamp: 3:24]

Well, that sure helps when you’re short on manpower and you may have somebody doing a one-man-band kind of thing on the tech side. I noticed you had some d&b Audiotecknik gear included in this. What type of their stuff did you put in there?

You know, the d&b we provided [was] the solution designed upon the T10 box, which is their line array box. So we used T10 line arrays, left and right, and then we also used the E12 as a center fill. We have some front fills going around as well as several subs around the bottom, and we used the D12s and the D6s for amplification. So used a lot of d&b products and had great results. Everything’s ran at 96k all the way to the amps, so it’s a great sounding system and we’ve been very pleased and impressed with their speakers. [Timestamps: 4:11]

A New Sound System for New Contemporary Church, Part 2

Sep 20, 2012 12:17 PM,
With Bennett Liles

Well, so far you’ve made it sound like this one was almost too easy. So was there any really tough task in the project or what was the biggest challenge in it? You know, honestly, it was a pretty fluid project. They were a great church to work with, and I would say the toughest thing was probably just the overall installation of it. With any installation of this size it takes some time and you know there’s always little things here and there—used conduit pulls and wiring and rigging and stuff that just takes some time and ingenuity and designing’s you gotta get through, and it was a pretty smooth system though. It was a fun project to be a part of. [Timestamp: 4:49]

And I’m sure they had things going on while the sound system installation was happening. I guess they didn’t have services and things like that going on in there yet though.

Fortunately this was actually a new build, so they didn’t have anything opened. We worked as the contractors worked. I mean if anything we were dodging carpet installation and other contractors to finish up the building project and we all finished at the same time and they had an opening service. So we didn’t have to dodge any type of special events or anything church schedule, I guess, but there’s always those constant scheduling between our contractors and the builder that our project manager Clayton Chaney takes care of and does a great job at. [Timestamp: 5:29]

Well, that made it a whole lot easier. What type of wireless mics did you put in there for the performers and pastors and so on?

They’re running Shure UHF-R mics with KSM9 heads—a great solution, high quality microphone that is doing the job just fine. They actually had that preexisting from their portable church and they just moved that over to this facility and we just integrated that with the new install. [Timestamp: 5:52]

And I guess you have some centrally located receivers and antennas for that?

Yes, the receivers were installed at FOH and able to be monitored from FOH, and we even hooked up Wireless Workbench and stuff, and then we have the antenna distribution as well. [Timestamp: 6:10]

So how long did it take you to do all of this?

You know it kind of came in two parts. The first part was just the wiring and rigging before all the finished work of the building went up and I would say wiring—pulling all the wires for the building and the rigging—was about four weeks and then part two was just the installation of the rack, the amps, hanging the actual speakers, and then just configuring everything and that was another two weeks; so it was about a six-week process of install. [Timestamp: 6:38]

Well, that’s not bad at all. It sounds like you had enough time to do everything without having to rush through it. So what’s coming up for Elite Multimedia? What have you got in the works?

Right now we’re actually finishing up a church here locally, Life Church of Memphis, their Collierville campus. We’re putting in a audio system there and finishing that up. We have First Baptist Church-Broad in Memphis that we’re finishing up and we have another project around the corner in Ohio. We’re really all over the place. We have several projects going on and we just keep going at it man—keep growing and keep going. [Timestamp: 7:12]

Well, that’s the way to go. You got this one down with no serious problems. It’s Wade Russell from Elite Multimedia in Memphis, Tenn., and the new sound installation for the Living Hope Church. Thanks for telling us about it.